The Weed That Strings The Hangman’s Bag

‘I was lying dead in the churchyard…’ So says eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce – but soon a murder provides a gruesome distraction from her own death…

A travelling puppet show arrives in the sleepy English village of Bishop’s Lacey and everyone gathers to watch a performance of Jack and the Beanstalk in the village hall. But a shadow is cast over proceedings when a shocking murder takes place during the performance – a murder which strangely echoes a tragedy that occurred many years before.

For Flavia, undoing the complex knot that ties these strands together will test her precocious powers of deduction to the limit – and throw a revealing light into some of the darker corners of the adult world…